Ending Doctors' strike calls for employer's commitment

I am compelled, once again, to contribute to a topic I understand only too well- compensation structuring and job evaluation.

As I have suggested before, let me start by reiterating that: job evaluation exercises are not meant for setting salary levels. They are designed for minimizing or removing pay disparities in a remuneration structure.

Since 2012, I have made several suggestions on the subject whenever I felt that the SRC could benefit from professional input - for free. I have also made it clear that my interest is mainly to contribute in an area of organization development I know to be complex and often mistaken as a domain for the Human Resource professional. Though a commonly held belief, – nothing personal - nothing could be farther from the truth.

If there was one thing that I have found rather perplexing, is the fact that there has been a lack of energy – or, put differently, a lack of curiosity – on the part of the key players in the public sector. The fact that the public sector in Kenya has one of the best trained, as well as a well-educated young population, one would have anticipated, and indeed, expected, some energetic reaction to many suggestions and professional input I have contributed to the thorny issue of the public sector’s wage bill.

At this time, I am more concerned about the published doctors’ pay structure for jobs grade L to T. I am particularly concerned about the idea that the structure derives from a job evaluation exercise. If it does, then it is horrifying to see a defective system being applied to an already defective public sector’s remuneration structure.

Unfortunately, the SRC appears determined to proceed along the same path in its efforts to set pay structures for the public universities, and other public institutions. The use of the same defective methods and systems will, without a doubt, continue to cause disruptive labor disputes of unprecedented proportions within the public sector.

As the salary curves for the doctors’ indicate, here below, something is seriously wrong. Even if one were to accept that a job evaluation exercise could be conducted for the purpose of setting pay levels in an organization – something it is not designed to do – still, it would be prudent to use acceptable systems, and rules. Otherwise it would be double tragedy to superimpose the results derived from a faulty system onto a defective compensation structure. And this is precisely what the SRC has attempted to do for the public sector. 

If the SRC, and the doctors’ employers - the Ministry of Health and the Public Service Commission (PSC) - understand and are comfortable with the above salary curves, then, the health sector in this country may be disrupted for a long time to come.

Let me conclude by suggesting that, perhaps a little research on what has been done in this area since the 1990s could give a glimpse of what to expect for the public sector in Kenya, if we choose to continue on the wrong path.

My suggestion is, for anyone interested, to check out the results of job evaluation exercises conducted for:

·                 Malawi

·                 Tanzania

·                 Uganda Revenue Authority, and may I suggest, here in Kenya:

·                 The Kenya Wild Service (KWS)

·                 KPCU, and let me throw in a private university in the mix:

·                 United States International University-A (USIU-A)

For any qualified job analyst, the shocking revelation is that they all relied on job evaluation systems that were designed for factory and operatives’ jobs. The public sector in Kenya is being subjected to the same systems, but this time, for the wrong purposes. This does NOT, and WILL NOT work.